About...

The distros listed on the Compatibility page were tested on various machines, some of which are now defunct. The current test machines are listed below. Each of these includes HDD mobile racks for interchangeable HD trays. The monitor is an Asus LCD that's shared (along with keyboard and mouse) via a NewStar NS-411K KVM switch. Note that, as of February 2008, most of the testing is done on QEMU virtual machines rather than on real hardware; the exceptions being 64-bit distros and distros that don't run well (or at all) under QEMU.

	QEMU VM running on sys5 (see below)
CPU	Intel Pentium II
Mainboard	Intel i440FX
RAM	128M, 256M, 512M, or 1G
Video	Cirrus Logic GD 5446 PCI VGA
	sys5 (primary testbox / secondary production machine)
CPU	AMD Athlon64 X2 4600+ (2400MHz, dual-core)
Mainboard	Asus M2V
RAM	4G DDR2
Video	Asus EN7600GS, 512M PCI Express
	sys4 (production machine / secondary testbox)
CPU	AMD Sempron 2800+ (1599MHz)
Mainboard	Asus M2V
RAM	4G DDR2
Video	Asus EN6200TC, 256M PCI Express
	test1 (testbox-only, non-production machine)
CPU	AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1532MHz)
Mainboard	ASRock K7VT2
RAM	384M SDR
Video	XFX GeForce 6200, 128M AGP

The interchangeable hard disks are listed below. Each of these has a pub partition where the C source tarballs are stored. Live distros are tested by mounting pub and compiling the code there; installed distros are tested in the usual way (by copying the tarballs from /pub to /usr/local/src). The list below is in the order of most often used.

QEMU VM disks	hda with 3 partitions (root, swap, and pub of varying sizes)
Maxtor 120G	hda with 10 partitions (7x12G root, 8G swap, 20G pub)
Maxtor 120G	hda with 13 partitions (10x10G root, 4G swap, 16G pub)
Maxtor 10G	hda with 3 partitions (6G root, 512M swap, 3G pub)
Seagate 120G	hdb with 16 partitions (13x6G root, 512M swap, 35G pub)

Some Background

I started using Linux in January 1999 (Slackware 3.5 at first, and RedHat 6.0 a half year later). Then, at a computer show in February 2000, I came across a boxed set of the Mandrake 6.1 Gold Pack distro and well... I've been hooked on Linux ever since.

It was sometime later that I started writing programs using KDevelop 1.1 and the KDE/Qt libraries (coming from a Windows background, it came closest to what I was doing before, i.e., using Borland C++). When KDE2 came out, the development libraries had changed so much that my programs no longer compiled or ran without major modifications to the source code. So, I stopped using the KDE/Qt libraries and started using the GNOME/GTK+ libraries.

Sometime around the beginning of 2002, I wrote a program called gHTTrack and created my first homepage (this website) to make it available to the general public. Later, I decided to add other programs to the page. Since these programs were now available to anyone with Internet access (and because I myself use different distros on different machines), portability became an important issue. I started testing several other Linux systems and soon came to realize that a lot of distros don't include the GNOME/GTK+ development libraries.

In May 2003, after a year-long break from programming, I decided to try using the ncurses libraries. The idea was that ncurses programs would be able to compile and run on any GNU/Linux system (even those that don't include a GUI environment). Well... much to my dismay, I came across several distros that don't include the ncurses libraries, many of which don't even include make or a C compiler. But, the ncurses programs do compile and run on quite a few more systems than their GNOME/GTK+ versions do, so I've decided that most of my future projects will include both (ncurses and GTK versions).

In October 2003, it came to my attention that some distros, even if they don't include GNOME, can still run The Gimp. This got me thinking, and I started doing some experimenting. I put together a test project using only the GTK+ library (no GNOME support) and tried it on a few distros. Much to my surprise, it ran on two distros that earlier projects didn't run on. Since GNOME doesn't seem to be supported in most recent distros, I've decided to only use the GTK+ library in future g* projects. The removal of the GNOME library dependancy should make them easier to install on non-RedHat-based systems.

In February 2006, I switched from Mandrake 9.1 to Debian 3.1 as my main OS. Shortly after, in March, I opened my first broadband Internet account. And shortly after that, in April, I suddenly found myself with a renewed interest in programming. May marks the completion of my first GTK2 project; I chose gFnRename because of its simplicity. With that project finished, the focus shifted to a more complicated one. June marks the completion of gHTTrack 0.4 and 0.5 (developed simultaneously for GTK1 and GTK2, respectively).

In January 2007, after several weeks of testing distros, I've come to realize that gettext is another issue that can cause compatibility problems. Due to the fact that it's so easy to put back in, I've decided to remove gettext support from the current GTK2 projects (gFnRename, gHTTrack, gTextCvt) and omit it from future projects.

In July 2007, it became increasingly clear that my machines were too under-powered to test some of the more recent distros. So, I decided to upgrade one of them with a 64-bit CPU and 4G RAM. Although my philosophy is usually "If it isn't broken, don't fix it", the upgrade means that I now have the ability to test 64-bit distros and other distros that require more resources than I previously had.

In February 2008, I started testing distros using virtual hard disks in QEMU sessions. I had used QEMU to test live CDs before but, until recently, didn't think it would be very practical to use QEMU for installations. Although it takes a bit longer to install a distro on a VM, there are some advantages. For distros that I've never tried before, using a VM is safer and easier. Installing on a VM also means that the physical machine isn't tied down while the installation is in progress.

In June 2010, after a 3-year long break from programming, I finally decided it was time to get back into it. I'd been looking for an easy way to purge my hard disk of the many duplicate files I'd collected over the years and, since I couldn't find a program that would provide a simple solution, I decided to write one. The program is called gDelDups and its simplicity gave me a good way to ease back into programming after being away from it for so long.

Applications

Below is a list of some of the programs that I currently use.

AcidRip	For converting video DVDs to AVI files.
AleVT	For reading TeleText pages. Works well in combination with XawTV.
Anjuta	For programming. I switched to this one a long time ago because KDevelop was too KDE-centric and created too much bloat.
ApplixOffice	For database stuff and for writing letters. I bought v4.4.2 in 1999 and it still runs on all the distros that I use.
Avidemux	For simple video editing.
D4X	For downloading distros and other large files from HTTP and FTP sites.
EasyTAG	For editing MP3 tags.
EmelFM	For file browsing/copying/moving.
Evince	(Debian 4.0) For reading PDF documents.
Firefox	(Debian 3.1) For local and non-local Web browsing.
GEdit	For editing text and HTML files when there are a lot to edit (e.g., when configuring a newly-installed system).
gFTP	For uploading files to my website.
Gimp	For editing images.
GQview	For viewing images.
GTKtalog	For cataloging the contents of CDs and DVDs.
Icedove	For reading and writing email.
Iceweasel	(Debian 4.0) For local and non-local Web browsing.
K3b	For burning CDs and DVDs. I switched to this one because xcdroast couldn't do DVDs without a proprietary library.
Kaffeine	For playing video clips if there are a lot to view.
KDict	For accessing the local dictionary server.
KGhostview	(Debian 3.1) For reading PDF documents.
Konqueror	For file browsing.
Kuickshow	For viewing images if I want a quick thumbnail view of all images in a directory.
KWrite	For writing and editing plain text and HTML files.
QEMU	Used in combination with QEMU Launcher. For running VMs, and for testing ISO and FD image files.
Synaptic	For installing pre-packaged software from the Debian DVDs.
Totem	For playing video clips if I just need a quick way to check the contents.
TVtime	Occasionally used for fullscreen TV viewing if I don't plan to do anything else at the same time.
XawTV	For normal TV viewing. AleVT works well in combination with this one.
XMMS	For playing MP3s, and for converting music CDs to MP3s (via the out-lame codec).

For questions, comments, etc... see the README file.

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This page was last updated on: Saturday, July 10, 2010